Amnesty questions Iraqi house demolitions by US

Amnesty International said Friday US forces appeared to be destroying houses in Iraq as a form of collective punishment for attacks on US troops and warned that that would violate the Geneva Conventions. A Pentagon spokesman emphatically denied it.

The human rights group said it had sent a letter to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanding clarification whether the demolitions as a form of collective punishment or deterrence was officially permitted.

"If such proved to be the case, it would constitute a clear violation of international humanitarian law," the group said in the letter.

A Pentagon spokesman acknowledged that US forces had destroyed "facilities," including houses, in the course of recent military operations but emphatically denied they were intended as a form of collective punishment or retaliation for attacks.

"We have destroyed facilities that were being used by former regime loyalists or terrorists either as a place from which to stage attacks, or as a safe house to avoid capture, or as a facility from which to construct improvised explosive devices," said Lieutenant Colonel Jim Cassella.

"The idea that this is some type of collective punishment is just absolutely without merit," he said.

"In some cases there have been incidents where these thugs have been using homes to do this, and in all cases where that happened the people who lived there were evacuated and then afterwards were relocated," he said.

"But what we are doing here is attacking the terrorist infrastructure to deny them the ability to plan, organize and initiate attacks," he said.